Darcey’s brain dump on all sorts of things on her favorite subject….Money! Email: darcey.martin@d2dsolutions.com

Being in the Know–Credit Score and Report….FREE!

Okay, so this is cool, I have been doing a little practicing what I preach….minding my own business….my money that is. What is the first thing we need to do you may ask? Where do we stand financially is a good start, but knowing how we got to where we are and how are we doing is also very important. Sometimes it can be painful to fess up to past behavior. Well a good way to start is to check out where you stand today credit wise. You can do it either way, check out your report first or your score first. I was doing my financial housekeeping and checking out my credit on annualcreditreport.com. This is a free service, you can see your report once a year from each of the bureaus. Being that there are 3 bureaus, it would be wise to check one bureau every 4 months, side note, put it on your email task list to check, or on your D2D Money Calendar. Well I checked out Transunion first. It looked decent….but I was dying to know my score…but as I am too frugal to pay the money. Well low and behold I was reading Motley Fool as I usually do to find out what is happening and to pick up more “edumacation” as I like to say. Well they told me about creditkarma.com where you can get your credit score for free, they are getting wise to the game, the more hits you have the more advertisers will pay, make services free, people will flock. Fair enough, I will take them up on their offer. And so I did. It is also considered a “soft inquiry”, hence not hitting the credit score. I have been minding my own business according to Fair Issac, he has rated me a 777, with a scale up to 850, there is room for improvement but not bad.